By the end of 1943, on the Eastern Front of the World War II, after Stalingrad, the Don operations, Kursk and the second recapture of Kharkov, the Soviet army managed to regain control of half of the territories it had lost until then, and the southern sector of the long Easter front line stretched in the middle of Ukraine, roughly along the Dnieper River. The next major Soviet offensive in the south began in late December 1943. It was during these operations that the Germans deployed a special heavy armored formation, which uniquely was composed only of Tiger and Panther tanks. This took place in January of 1944, when two Panzer battalions were temporarily deployed as a regimental unit subordinated to the staff of the German 11th Panzer Regiment in the Vinnytsia area. Under the command of Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Franz Baeke, this heavy Panzer regiment engaged Soviet forces (mainly tank and mechanized troops) in two operations. These clashes are considered to be among the most fiercest in the history of the Eastern Front. The "Baeke" heavy armored regiment existed for just over a month and took part in only two operations in January and February 1944, but over the course of a mere 24 days of combat it knocked out more than 500 Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns. With that, it became a legend overnight. To date, no work has been written that focuses exclusively on this unit and gathers all the available information on the day-to-day combat activities of this extraordinary tank formation. With this book the author actually had only one goal in mind: to establish, on the basis of archival documents of the Soviet and German units, as well as the relevant secondary research literature, whether the outstanding combat performance attributed to the "Baeke" heavy Panzer regiment, with which the unit indelibly wrote itself into the chronicle of World War II armored warfare, could be proved at all. This book, due to its uniquely detailed presentation of its topic, provides an exciting insight into the deeper tactical intricacies of the battles on the Eastern Front in this period of the war.
